


Trouble, and romance

by lea_hazel



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Curses, Other, POV Second Person, Separations, Star-crossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-05-04 00:19:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5312549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lea_hazel/pseuds/lea_hazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't you dare forget me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trouble, and romance

Being a zee-captain’s sweetheart is no mean feat. 

Of course, anyone could have told you that (and many did). You chose to proceed with this course of action, well aware of the many sorrows that lay in wait. As your friends will not cease to remind you. You accept this, as much as it is possible to accept a fate obscured by shadows. Come what may, you said.  _Don’t forget me, come what may._  

Nothing in the Neath comes without a price. For you, the price is bright, lively days with sleepless nights. Smiles in the mornings, and long anxious evenings waiting for dark news to knock at the door. Visits, always too brief. A night of spine-tingling stories over a fine-vintage of wine, your friends gathered around, leaning forward, thirsty for every terrifying word. A few warm, quiet evenings, then a lingering goodbye at the docks. 

Every meeting is as sweet as the weeks and months of loneliness preceding it were heart-rending. 

Sometimes you imagine you can smell the zee wherever you go. When your zee-captain is away, you stay far away from the docks, having no business there and no desire to torment yourself. Yet the smell of it follows you. Almost, you can feel a cold easterly wind whipping at your hair. Behind each shadow it hides, black as pitch. Tarry, clinging, foul-smelling, so swift to bind your limbs and drag you down into the depths. 

You imagine you can smell the briny smell of it, sometimes. The smell of salt follows you around your daily errands and you pause once, on an afternoon shopping excursion, suddenly chilled to the bone. Any day now, any day now your captain will return, bearing unnerving tales and strange baubles. You reach out your hands to a vendor’s whispering brazier. Why can’t you grow warm? 

Night creeps up on you, long dark fingers crawling up the streets to wrap around your arms. You do not fear the dark; no true Londoner does, of course. Still you make haste to your room, where you shut the door against the clinging dark and stir the fire to springing life. 

The darkness has been shut out but the smell of salt is still upon you, stronger than ever, it cloys the air. Shutting your eyes, you remember: a dockside tavern, a crush of people, a pair of bright eyes. A warm, comforting night, the first of many such. Clear as sparkling scintillack, you can feel an oval form pressed in your closed hand, the chain trickling, tickling between your fingers. The gold warms in your grip, heats, burns like the fires of Mount Palmerston –which you have never seen. It scalds your skin. 

Did you imagine it? You feel no such thing, now. You open your eyes. All around you is calm and quiet, nothing exceptional, nothing out of place. The windows are shuttered, the fire throws a lively light against your bare walls. You have lived in the Neath all your life and you do not fear the dark. All is quiet. 

Softly insistent, wrapping you in a gentle hug. The dark doesn’t frighten you; only the quiet, and the cold. 

At the last, it numbly occurs to you that you no longer need dread opening the door to receive dark news. 


End file.
